{"id":399,"date":"2026-06-07T10:10:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T10:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=399"},"modified":"2026-06-07T10:10:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T10:10:38","slug":"the-star-crossed-recluse-who-brought-astrology-to-the-masses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=399","title":{"rendered":"The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The astrologer Linda Goodman died in the season of Libra, on October 21, 1995, at Penrose Hospital, in Colorado Springs. The cause, according to her obituary in the Times<\/em>, was complications of diabetes, and she was survived by two sons, one daughter, and two grandchildren. These were immutable facts\u2014as true and observable as the autumn constellations on the night that Goodman died (Pegasus, the winged horse, and Cassiopeia, the arrogant queen, among others) or the dazzling peak, that same evening, of the Orionid meteor shower. What was less certain, at least at the time, was how old Goodman had lived to be. For nearly three decades\u2014ever since she made the leap from private citizen to national celebrity, in 1968, with the blockbuster success of her first book, \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Sun Signs\u201d\u2014she took great pains to hide her age from the public. She never revealed it in interviews and, although she published six books during her lifetime, together spanning thousands of pages, she never once committed her birth date to paper. She did share that she was born under the sign of Aries, but she kept the year secret; the writer of her Times<\/em> obituary could estimate only that she was \u201cabout 70.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Goodman\u2019s decision to remain publicly ageless was, perhaps, a pragmatic one. When \u201cSun Signs\u201d came out, and became the first astrology text to hit the Times<\/em>\u2019 best-seller list, Goodman was in her forties. She may have thought it advantageous to present herself as a New Age ing\u00e9nue\u2014one who could speak directly to the baby boomers then flocking to esoteric diversions\u2014rather than as an elder from the Greatest Generation. Or it was in service to vanity: Goodman was a former beauty queen, with thick chestnut hair and vulpine eyes, and she preferred to style herself in the youthful boho fashion of chunky necklaces and high-vibrational pastel colors.<\/p>\n

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Whatever the reason, Goodman\u2019s omission was an odd move for a professional astrologer. A person\u2019s astrological chart lays out the relative positions of the planets and stars at the moment of birth, and it cannot be calculated without an exact year, date, and time. Goodman, who regularly produced charts for high-profile clients, would have known this. By withholding her birth details, she maintained a kind of astrological upper hand: she could make grand pronouncements about the fates of others while keeping her own destiny under seal. Perhaps she didn\u2019t want anyone to contradict her hard-earned understanding of reality, which included, among other beliefs, the conviction that she would never die.<\/p>\n

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Toward the end of her life, Goodman became obsessed with the idea that death was avoidable. \u201cPhysical immortality is natural\u2014and death is unnatural,\u201d she wrote in her fifth book, \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Star Signs,\u201d from 1987. She implored her readers to \u201cimagine the spirals of your cells turning the opposite direction and repeat aloud, I am immortal, and I now ordain my body to demonstrate this<\/em>.\u201d She also encouraged those hoping to outwit oblivion to take para-aminobenzoic-acid supplements, to drink at least two eight-ounce glasses of unsweetened grape juice every day, to refrain from pornography, to forgive all their enemies, and to stop eating meat (\u201cHunters and fishermen cannot achieve eternal life,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI\u2019m truly sorry about that\u201d). Goodman was not only a militant vegetarian but, in her final years, a committed \u201cfruitarian\u201d who was working toward becoming what she called a \u201cbreathtarian\u201d\u2014immortals, she claimed, could survive on air alone. She urged her acolytes to boast about their efforts to transcend the human condition. \u201cDon\u2019t be ashamed of your new enlightenment,\u201d she wrote. \u201cTalk about it to every person you meet. Friends, relatives and business associates. Ignore their ridicule.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It would be easy to think of Goodman, who lived out her last years as a recluse in the Colorado mountains, as just another caftaned kook who\u2019d spent too much time at altitude. Or, less kindly, to paint her as a savvy opportunist who made millions from hawking a woo-woo fad, and whose teachings, once fairly benign, became increasingly dangerous over time. But Goodman\u2019s story is far stranger, and more significant, than that of a dippy mystic or a metaphysical scam artist. Born in a humble West Virginia mining town, she helped to push astrology, once a niche interest, into the center of the Zeitgeist. Her books sold upward of thirty million copies while she was alive, becoming fixtures on coffee tables and nightstands. Before \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Sun Signs\u201d emerged, discussions of the zodiac were confined to fringe scenes and scant newspaper columns; by the mid-seventies, a person might casually bring up her sign during a first date or a dinner party. Goodman, with her friendly, approachable writing style, demystified what had previously been a wonky, mathematical discipline, allowing even casual readers to feel a newfound connection with the tides of the universe. The cost was that she became trapped in a bizarre private cosmos of her own making.<\/p>\n

Goodman didn\u2019t live forever, but she got the next best thing: a passionate biographer. \u201cFollow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America\u2019s Forgotten Astrology Queen\u201d (University of Iowa Press), by Courtney Ann LaFaive, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, is a pensive, often sublime book that isn\u2019t a dutiful work of scholarship so much as an adventure tale, blending fiction, criticism, and memoir. LaFaive is quick to note that she did not arrive at her subject neutrally. She first discovered \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Sun Signs\u201d in 2001, when she was thirteen and browsing the stacks of the public library in her rural Wisconsin home town. LaFaive, like Goodman, was born in April, and she describes being instantly intoxicated by Goodman\u2019s description of an Aries:<\/p>\n

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The Aries girl will open her own doors. She\u2019ll also put on her own coat, fight her own battles, pull out her own chair, hail her taxi and light her cigarette without any masculine help.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Scarlett O\u2019Hara is the very epitome of the Mars-ruled Aries female.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Both the O\u2019Hara and the Aries characters are tough enough to defy convention, face an advancing army, or even shoot a man through the head with icy calmness, if he threatens her loved ones.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI had no cigarettes to smoke or taxis to hail,\u201d LaFaive writes. \u201cI had no idea who Scarlett O\u2019Hara was\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. but I was, indeed, alone and friendless. Linda\u2019s words strummed the truth of my being. This is who I am.<\/em>\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. If I had any battles to fight or coats to put on, even at thirteen, I most certainly would\u2019ve done so myself. I kept reading.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is astrology\u2019s allure: the feeling, at once comforting and enlivening, that your idiosyncrasies can be traced to forces far greater than yourself. The young LaFaive quickly became a Goodman completist; after reading \u201cSun Signs,\u201d she picked up \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Love Signs,\u201d from 1978, a mega-successful, nearly twelve-hundred-page tome that explores the dynamics of every possible partnership in the zodiac. Both books are fixed in their time\u2014Goodman writes only about heterosexual relationships, and she includes observations about what signs make the best and worst housewives. (\u201cSagittarius girls are acutely bored by the confinement of dusting and mopping.\u201d) If LaFaive recognized such flaws, they did not dampen her enthusiasm. She dragged Goodman\u2019s books with her to college, where her friends groaned when she quoted her favorite passages. This dismissal, LaFaive writes, made her feel even more certain about her devotion. \u201cAstrology embraces the irrational,\u201d she writes. \u201cIt accepts nonlinearity: life moving in a cyclical fashion. It values vulnerability: studying the skies to become intimately aware of a person\u2019s gifts and challenges. Perhaps I shouldn\u2019t have been so surprised when I encountered resistance toward my literary love.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s dangerous to write a biography from a place of adoration. LaFaive begins her project with a zealous mission: to restore Goodman\u2019s title as the foremother of American astrology. Early in the book, she describes proposing Goodman as a dissertation topic in graduate school, and gatekeepers of grants and fellowships, who called the subject both frivolous and thin, pointing out that LaFaive had few source materials at her disposal. Goodman had produced piles of published work, but she hadn\u2019t left behind any known diaries or an archive of her correspondence. Astrology, a pursuit that hovers in the nebulous space between science and storytelling, is not exactly a robust academic field, and LaFaive had no scholarly studies of Goodman\u2019s life or work to consult.<\/p>\n

Still, she pressed on. LaFaive felt that Goodman had been fundamentally mistreated, particularly in the wake of a defining tragedy. In 1973, Goodman\u2019s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Sally, was found dead in her apartment, in Manhattan. The police deemed it a suicide, but Goodman refused to accept the ruling\u2014or even the fact that Sally was gone at all. Instead, she consulted Sally\u2019s birth chart and concluded that somewhere, somehow, her daughter was still alive. The resulting press\u2014which painted Goodman as an unstable oddball, unable to accept her daughter\u2019s mortality\u2014made her an ideal candidate for \u201ca feminist revisionist biography,\u201d LaFaive writes. \u201cI felt I understood why Linda was maligned,\u201d she adds. \u201cShe existed at the crux of the occult and mourning, a space doubly subject to patriarchal judgment.\u201d It was only after LaFaive set out to prove this theory that she began to question whether the problem was not the story swirling around Goodman but Goodman herself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Goodman was born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, on April 9, 1925. (The date was finally confirmed by a data collector who claims to have found her birth certificate.) There is little information about her childhood, and what there is comes from an unreliable source: Goodman\u2019s penultimate book, a thousand-plus-page quasi-autobiography that she published, in 1989, with the preposterously goofy title of \u201cGooberz.\u201d In \u201cGooberz,\u201d which is written in haphazard poetic verse, she describes her parents frequently being out of town, and her staying with a neighboring Black couple named Bob and Grace Carpenter, from whom she first gleaned a mystical education. Grace, she writes, told \u201cperfectly marvelous faerie stories \/ while she bustled around, getting breakfast \/\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. she and Bob believed in druids too, like me.\u201d Goodman was raised Catholic, but her faith wavered after an early cascade of losses: first, her beloved grandmother died, then a close friend, and then her prized cat. One day, after watching a local boy squish a colony of ants, she had a feeling of despair that she describes as \u201cthe dreadful dilemma \/ of my struggle to make Life and Death rhyme.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her twenties, Goodman married a man named William Snyder, a union that was soon marked by calamity. Goodman miscarried multiple times, and lost at least one child in infancy. She and Snyder ultimately had two healthy children, but the relationship fractured and they separated. Not long afterward, Snyder died\u2014the cause, according to \u201cGooberz,\u201d was alcoholism and pneumonia\u2014and Goodman, suddenly a young single mother, struggled to make sense of her situation. \u201cWhy do I still hope\u2014why?\u201d she writes. \u201cWhen people die, they die \/ why, oh, why can\u2019t I realize that? \/ I believe it\u2014I know it \/ but why can\u2019t I\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. realize<\/em> it?\u201d<\/p>\n

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In LaFaive\u2019s telling, it was Goodman\u2019s inability to reconcile life and death which helped her excel in her breakthrough job, as the host of a radio program called \u201cLove Letters from Linda.\u201d (This appears to be when she changed her first name.) On the show, LaFaive writes, Goodman read letters from soldiers stationed abroad during wartime, many of whom expressed anxiety about ever seeing their loved ones again. Goodman likely had a knack for soothing her listeners\u2014she had a mesmerizing voice, low-pitched and lilting\u2014and assuring them that their desired reunions were imminent. \u201cThis talent of hers,\u201d LaFaive writes, \u201cinjecting hope into the most fraught possibilities, of convincing those who have been separated by dissonance or distance that they can be brought back together again\u2014would make her celebrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

During her time as a radio host, Goodman met her second husband, Sam Goodman, \u201ca onetime disc jockey and carnival comic,\u201d according to an article in People<\/em>, and together they moved to New York City, where Goodman had two more children. Sometime in the mid-sixties, Sam brought home a coffee-table book about astrology, and Linda became consumed by it, launching into a self-education that approached mania. \u201cI think she stayed in a nightgown studying astrology twenty hours a day for a year,\u201d her husband later told People<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Goodman taught herself how to make detailed astrological charts, which, in the decades before the internet, involved labor-intensive hand calculations to determine planetary movements. She began offering her services to acquaintances in Manhattan, and word spread. In 1969, a Miami News<\/em> report cited her exorbitantly expensive rates\u2014up to a thousand dollars for a single birth-chart analysis. Hoping to share her knowledge more widely (and, presumably, to find a more efficient way of earning income), Goodman turned to writing. She put out \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Sun Signs\u201d with a small publisher, asserting that you could learn \u201cup to ninety percent\u201d about a person simply by knowing her sun sign. Goodman described each in a bold, conspiratorial tone: \u201cTaureans would rather entertain hospitably at home than go to the trouble of visiting. The effort required for scintillating popularity doesn\u2019t appeal to the bull\u2019s nature\u201d; \u201cLeo, the person, rules you and everybody else. (Yes, yes, I know he really doesn\u2019t. But please don\u2019t tell him. It would break his big, warm, egotistical heart.)\u201d<\/p>\n

The enormous success of \u201cSun Signs\u201d was, in part, a matter of good timing. By the late sixties, the average person was increasingly exposed to the outer realms of both consciousness and the known universe. (In 1968, a few months after Goodman\u2019s book hit shelves, NASA<\/em> sent the first manned crew to orbit the moon.) Astrology, an ancient divination practice that has its roots in Mesopotamia and was considered an academic vocation until the eighteenth century, has experienced swells of popularity over the ages, but none so pronounced as the explosion during the sixties and seventies, when horoscopes crossed fully into the mainstream. Betty Crocker published a recipe for an \u201cAge of Aquarius\u201d cake. Yves Saint Laurent designed a cocktail dress printed with astrological symbols. Even a serial killer adopted the Zodiac as his moniker. By 1975, the trend was so widespread that a group of more than a hundred leading scientists, including eighteen Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter titled \u201cObjections to Astrology,\u201d in which they expressed exasperated concern. \u201cWe must all face the world,\u201d the letter read, \u201cand we must realize that our futures lie in ourselves, and not in the stars.\u201d Notably, one scientist who refused to sign the letter was the astronomer Carl Sagan\u2014\u201cnot because I thought astrology has any validity,\u201d he wrote, \u201cbut because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cSun Signs\u201d made Goodman famous, and she altered her life accordingly. She separated from Sam and decided to move to Cripple Creek, Colorado, a former gold-rush town that had become known as one of the West\u2019s most haunted locales. She settled down among old brothels and saloons and started to write her next book. Then she got the call about Sally, and her world collapsed.<\/p>\n

LaFaive\u2019s book really takes off when she starts writing about Sally\u2019s death. The police allegedly found an eight-page note and a bottle of barbiturates at Sally\u2019s side, and Sam identified his stepdaughter\u2019s body. Still, Goodman flew to Manhattan not to mourn Sally but to look for her. She had dreamed that her daughter was alive, and took it as a sign. The Times<\/em> later reported that Goodman was so frantic that she hung around New York in a daze for weeks, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral. She begged N.Y.P.D. detectives to take her seriously, insisting that someone had replaced Sally\u2019s body with a double. Here, LaFaive deploys a bold technique, inhabiting Goodman\u2019s perspective at the moment of crisis:<\/p>\n

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She tells them about everything we already know\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. her intuition, and the natal chart. And, sure, that\u2019s all a little kooky to a bunch of police officers, but they\u2019re nodding along, trying to appear sympathetic, because, again, her daughter is dead. She\u2019s distraught. Then, Linda pauses and delivers her bombshell evidence: Officers, I dreamt of my Sally. I saw her in my dreams\u2014I know she\u2019s alive. I saw her. Felt her<\/em>. Did they write down the word dreams<\/em>? Say, Tell us more, Linda. What exactly did you dream of<\/em>? Grab her hands and say, Oh, sweet-heart<\/em>.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Certainly not. When I imagine Linda saying those words, all I can see are their faces crinkling and their bellies jiggling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As LaFaive digs deeper into Goodman\u2019s story, though, she finds herself increasingly unable to comprehend Goodman\u2019s motivations, and so she turns to others for answers. She contacts members of Lindaland, a small but lively online forum where dozens of Goodman devotees engage in close readings of \u201cGooberz\u201d and discussion of past lives. She travels to Cripple Creek, to commune with Goodman\u2019s old house and meet her acquaintances. People seem oddly frightened to talk about Goodman, as if she were still alive and listening, but LaFaive finally has a breakthrough when she contacts a man whom she calls Albert Bodin, in Maine. Sally, an actress, had spent her last summer living in Bodin\u2019s farmhouse while performing at a local theatre, and, seven years after Sally\u2019s death, Goodman called Bodin to ask for his help in finding her. At first, he happily obliged\u2014if there was any chance that Sally was still alive, he wanted to lend a hand\u2014but the situation quickly turned disturbing. According to Bodin, Goodman brought along an alleged former C.I.A. agent named David, and, after months of meeting with Bodin and his family, the two ultimately threatened to harm him if he refused to disclose the names of the people who\u2019d worked with Sally that summer. Bodin survived the ordeal but was left shaken and scared, certain that he\u2019d narrowly escaped a worse fate.<\/p>\n

At this point, LaFaive\u2019s narrative begins to splinter. Although eager for evidence that Goodman was wronged\u2014the victim of a misogynistic media that wanted to undermine both astrology and the woman who made it popular\u2014she comes to see that her subject is more than a mere vector for an argument. In Goodman\u2019s hurt, she hurt others. LaFaive grows angry, imagining herself barging into Goodman\u2019s house in Cripple Creek: \u201cI want to find Linda sitting at her kitchen table, a Newport smoldering between her fingers, as she reads the morning paper in a terry-cloth robe.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. I want to walk up to her, bat the newspaper away, look her square in the teeth and say, What the hell are you doing<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, LaFaive\u2019s book becomes more thrilling when she surrenders to the possibility that she is writing not a eulogy but a portrait of one woman\u2019s many contradictory selves. The obsessiveness that spurred Goodman\u2019s success\u2014she sold the paperback rights for \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Love Signs,\u201d from 1978, for $2.25 million, at the time the highest sum ever for a nonfiction book\u2014is the same quality that kept her searching for her daughter. She was rich, but almost comically uninterested in material wealth (she apparently gave away most of her earnings); she was prolific, but much of her work was opaque and borderline nonsensical (even LaFaive admits that, for years, she couldn\u2019t finish \u201cGooberz\u201d). What LaFaive finds, looking clearly at Goodman, is not enlightenment but a kind of radical empathy. She begins to weave her own story into the book\u2014LaFaive married an unstable man, and she writes through the heartbreak of her divorce\u2014and, in so doing, earns a deeper understanding of Goodman, not as an all-knowing guru but as a flawed human being, looking to the skies for what to do next.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We may be in the middle of a new astrology boom. A 2025 Pew Research survey revealed that thirty per cent of adults \u201cconsult astrology (or a horoscope), tarot cards, or a fortune teller at least once a year,\u201d and astrology influencers seem to pop up daily on TikTok. Both astrology and biography attempt to wrestle something infinitely complex\u2014be it a human life or the heavens\u2014into order. But perhaps the only thing we know for sure is how vast the universe is, and how boundless our yearning. At the end of her book, LaFaive admits that she has written a \u201cfailed biography,\u201d insofar as she was unable to present a grand, unified theory of Goodman. To my mind, though, she succeeds because she accepts what she can\u2019t know, the truths that not even the stars can explain.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more When Should You Say Goodbye to a Pet?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Syme reviews \u201cFollow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America\u2019s Forgotten Astrology Queen,\u201d by Courtney Ann LaFaive, a book about the author of \u201cLinda Goodman\u2019s Sun Signs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=399\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses - 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